My countryman, the comedian John Oliver, was once asked by a radio call-in guest whether he had ever managed to score an amorous encounter with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. His response, delivered with commendable sang-froid, was:

There's a short answer and a long answer to that question. The short answer is "no". The long answer is "no, obviously not."

Reading the coverage of Destiny'srecent alpha, and specifically the reaction to Peter Dinklage's voiceover work as Ghost, this seemed like a good place to ask the question "will adverse reaction to Peter Dinklage's voiceover affect sales of Bungie's first new IP since Halo? The title
Sony put at the front of their E3 presentation, and which publisher Activision is expecting to be a billion-dollar franchise?"

There's a short answer and a long answer to that question.

Old Russia, where a wizard is. Unexpectedly. He came from the moon, you know.

Voices don't sell games

The first, and most obvious, point to make here is that nobody - or to be exact almost nobody - makes buying decisions based purely on who is voicing characters in games. This is not to say that these voiceovers don't matter. Voiceover actors like Jennifer Hale and Nolan North are clearly celebrities in their own right, to the extent that prominent people in games culture can be said to be celebrities. And games can be elevated artistically by strong voiceover performances.

It's hard to imagine Bastion without Logan Cunningham, for example, or Portal 2 without Stephen Merchant. On the other hand, Richard Ayoade was originally considered as the voice of Wheatley. Would that have been better? Worse? Different? Definitely the last, possibly either of the first. But it would not have changed the quality of the puzzles.

Do voiceover actors significantly affect buying decisions? I would say not. The presence of either video game celebrities or mainstream Hollywood actors is I think more at the level of the quality of the licensed soundtrack in a game. The licensed soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is, I would say, better in recognisability, range and coherence than the licensed soundtrack of Watch_Dogs. However, if the Grand Theft Auto games had been terrible, unplayable messes, the best soundtrack in the world would not have enticed tens of millions to buy and play them.

Driving in GTA is fun. Driving while listening to "Me and the Biz" is the icing on the cake.

The same, I would say, applies to voiceover talent. Of course there are superfans who bought ODST, and will buy Destiny, for the pleasure of interacting with the recorded voice of the adorable Nathan Fillion*. But this number is vanishingly small, and Fillion is, after Firefly and Castle, a genuine star. It may have provided some publicity, but how many people's decision to buy Mass Effect 3 was based on the chance to swap lines with a digitized Jessica Chobot?

The simple truth is that games are not film or TV, and players of games have different criteria than "is my favorite actor in this"? Indeed, the decision to hire a big name non-voice actor can lead to a less satisfactory overall product, because these actors are generally more hurried, less available to promote the game and less experienced with the demands of game voice acting.

(Legendarily, Giselle Loren voiced Buffy Summers in the first Xbox Buffy the Vampire Slayer game, with the TV cast otherwise reprising their parts, and did such a good job that, although Sarah Michelle Geller was available for the sequel, Loren was retained to portray her character.)

However, ultimately a workable voice track is a workable voice track - outside the top and bottom of the quality curve, it has a minimal effect on purchase decisions.

In general, the alpha seems to have raised rather than lowered Destiny's stock, with writers who previously had limited interest - such as my colleague Paul Tassi, whose thoughts can be found in the sidebar - seeing the value proposition more clearly having had the opportunity to explore the world a little.

It gets better (maybe)

I realize that the above is, ultimately, just one more reckon on a heap of reckons. However, there are some practical considerations.

I visited Bungie's offices earlier this year. While there, I played the House of the Devils - the "strike" mission featured in the Alpha. At that point, the voice track had not been added, but the feature set was much as players of the alpha last weekend experienced. At that point Peter Dinklage had been cast, and had recorded some voice tracks - fans had recognized his voice in early promo material - but had clearly not read the full script, because the script was still being written.

Since the House of Devils was largely complete even by then, I suspect that this would have been voiced early. I spoke to an experienced director of game dialog, who listened to Dinklage's voiceover work and suggested that it sounded like the lines were read relatively "cold".

It's all down to resources and opportunity. If your project has the time and the money and actor availability to keep on re-recording main cast throughout development, of course you'll do so. Otherwise, you use placeholder - even text-to-speech robot voice - for as long as you can to minimize pick-up sessions and wasted work. Then only when you know precisely what you need in terms of the project's scale, line count, memory footprint on disc, overall structure, tone, timings etc do you record it with your star VO talent and direct it properly.

If you only get one shot at it, you record as late as you can, as late as the animation department will let you. Maybe you have to do the cutscene lines earlier so the cinematics team can work with final audio, but for the incidental VO, record it late so all the production/design changes have already happened. Maybe leave time for a last-minute pick-up session, but with enough time in the schedule for the localization department to translate it all, cast it and re-record it in all the various languages and for those audio assets to get into various specific builds, a full QA pass, feedback, nips and tucks.

But in my experience this basically never happens. Actors suddenly become available at short notice, or not available at even shorter notice, or the deadline or scope for the big E3 game build or trailer changes.

Certainly, an actor as feted as Peter Dinklage would come with availability constraints. The placeholder is often contributed in-house - notably in the cheery placeholder in the first showing of Portal 2 provided by Valve's Richard Lord, who was the nearest available Briton. But, my source pointed out, if the opportunity exists to get the cast actor to read the lines, so much the better.

If you suddenly find out you've got an hour of the voice talent's time, though, sure, why not record them? The only trouble is, Sod's Law dictates that it's not going to be an hour you can get your writer or audio director to sit in on.

It's the art of the possible: you do what you can do, and the choices are usually not optimal.

I would hazard a guess that, because Old Russia was the focus of development into a playable environment for the slices, this was some of the earlier pieces voiceover work recorded, because the script was signed off early. There is every possibility that other voice parts are from further points, where the lore and narrative have been firmed up and the actor has more of a grasp on the character.

It is a consequence of the way games are made that sometimes there simply isn't time to record every line until it is perfect. However, Bungie are going to be polishing Destiny frenetically over the next three months. This may involve retakes. It will certainly involve modulating and tweaking the voice track, which is clearly currently unprocessed.

In short, the finished product is not only going to be more polished than even this unusually polished alpha, it is also going to be far, far bigger. And the fact that that wizard came from the moon will be part of a much larger whole.

UPDATE: Bungie have taken the whole thing in good spirit, and have produced this T-shirt, with all profits from the sale going to the Bungie Foundation's charitable efforts. It is apparently outselling everything else in the store.

* I talked to Nathan Fillion about his experience of voicing Reynolds and Buck in the Halo series, and the oddness of hearing one's own voice when playing multiplayer. On one occasion he was multiplaying, he related, and one of his team asked him "Dude, has anyone ever mentioned that you sound a lot like Nathan Fillion?" So, wheels within wheels.

I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.